The Trojan Family is certainly still reeling from Saturday afternoon’s gut-wrenching defeat at the hands of a top-five Penn State Nittany Lions squad, who only led for a mere 15 seconds throughout the game and still found a victorious outcome.
With this the third consecutive loss where the Trojans had the lead in the fourth quarter only to wilt and wither away in the game’s deciding moments, it seems as though USC is not yet ready for the requisite physicality or mental toughness necessary to be a contender in the BIG-10. With the Trojans all but eliminated from college football playoff contention, Lincoln Riley now a mere 11-10 in his past 21 games, and no semblance, blueprint, or even mirage of a Mecca in sight, we dissect what went wrong against Penn State, and what a realistic diagnosis is of this once-storied program moving forward.
Lincoln Riley’s Seat After Another USC Collapse
Offense
Riley actually drew up a terrific offensive gameplan most of the first half, namely, after assessing the Nittany Lions’ activity on the opening drive of the game, the third-year Trojans coach used Penn State’s overzealousness against itself. The Nittany Lions’ exemplary pass rush, coupled with the juice in the stadium worthy of a pageantry game as we like to refer to them on LAFBs USC podcast, Salute to Troy, saw Penn State lose edge containment and gap integrity early in the game. Riley observed this and leveraged an insightful tool to exploit Penn State’s early eagerness – misdirection.
In fact, the Trojans had four scoring drives in the first half, and three of them (with the Desman Stephens interception return setting up a field goal as the other) were a direct result of Riley methodically dialing up misdirection. The first scoring drive was the electric Quentin Joyner fake reverse 75-yard touchdown run. The second touchdown drive was the broken flea flicker that saw Woody Marks run for 21 yards upon which the Trojans ran tempo and Marks got an additional 28 yards on the next play due to Penn State’s tentativeness for more misdirection.
While the final field goal of the first half was once again an over-the-top screen pass to Marks in the flat for 33 yards as the Trojans intentionally let Penn State’s rush get sucked too far into the pocket.
The problem was after halftime, once the Nittany Lions settled down and played straight-up, aggressive, gap-sound defense, the Trojans could barely muster anything the rest of the way, Outside of Miller Moss’ 25-yard completion to Duce Robinson on third and six of the go-ahead fourth-quarter drive, the Trojans didn’t have a single explosive play after intermission. Riley was able to synthetically protect his offensive line for a half – but then the gimmick was up.
Defense
So much has been made of how the defense has improved under D’Anton Lynn in 2024 compared to Alex Grinch a season ago. While that’s true at a statistically superficial level, namely points and yards allowed per game; it fails to take into consideration conference context. The BIG-10 is emphatically a slower-paced conference than the PAC-12 was last year, and while the Trojans gave up 34 points per game last year in the wild, wide-open West Coast, if you take away the Utah State game and only focus on Power Five competition, USC has given up 25 points per game this season.
Normalizing the pace of play across both those conferences, the Trojans would be giving up about 30 points per game if this defense was applied to last year’s context. That’s only an incremental improvement – certainly not significant enough to warrant all the hype.
Part of this only modest improvement stemmed from the Trojans not having an elite, singular pass rusher. Everything Lynn does schematically is predicated on creating disguised zone shell concepts off the weak side from the primary rush. The Trojans simply don’t have a player this year nearly to the caliber of UCLA’s Laiatu Latu, a one-man wrecking crew off the edge who had 13 sacks for Westwood last year. The Trojans as a team only have six sacks through six games, with Eric Gentry leading in that department with two despite missing the past two games altogether.
As a result, this team simply cannot get stops when they absolutely need them. We saw it up 24-20 against Michigan and again up 17-10 against Minnesota – act three of this tragic play was the 75-yard drive when the Trojans were up 30-23 late. Penn State converted two consecutive fourth down throws and ultimately conceded a walk-in, wide-open touchdown stroll to tie the game.
Furthermore, we all knew how vital Penn State tight end Tyler Warren was to the Nittany Lions’ operation, yet he still generated 17 catches for 224 yards and one touchdown. Warren was repeatedly wide open despite being Penn State’s only consistent offensive weapon. Check the 2022 regular season Utah game tape, and Dalton Kincaid’s 16 catch 234-yard, one-touchdown performance was eerily similar to Warren’s on Saturday. The jump from Grinch to Lynn wasn’t a Marvel-worthy superhero leap, rather, a ginger step to avoid annoying mud on the sidewalk.
Game Management
This is actually the area where Riley deserves the greatest criticism. Tied at 30 with a little less than three minutes to go and then at midfield with approximately a minute and a half left and timeouts in hand, Riley literally ran the clock out on himself. Inexcusably letting the time wind down to 14 seconds, where James Franklin equally perplexingly called a timeout for Riley.
With such limited time left and still 15 yards from field goal range, it forced Miller Moss to push a ball downfield in a way completely unnecessary if the Trojans utilized a timeout with 35-40 seconds left. If you told any Trojan fan, we could fast forward the game to be tied with 2:53 left in the fourth and USC in possession of the ball only needing a field goal to win, everyone would have ecstatically taken that scenario. Of course, that was predicated on Riley actually being rational.
Lost in the stunning ineptitude of the game’s conclusion was Riley’s unimaginative and ineffective play-calling to close drives in the second quarter. Three times the Trojans had a chance to go up three scores, up 14-3 with the ball in plus territory after the Stephens interception, leading 17-3 with the ball two possessions later, and finally holding a 17-6 advantage again in plus territory on the last drive of the half.
The inability to stretch to three scores allowed the Nittany Lions to stay offensively composed and balanced to start the second half and ultimately enabled the lead to erode swiftly after halftime. It’s shocking that an offensive genius still can’t comprehend how to manufacture additional possessions via his expertise.
Moving forward, the rest of the Trojans 2024 season is a glorified preseason for 2025, which now serves as Lincoln Riley’s make-it or break-it year. If, in this day and age by year four, Riley can’t get USC to playoff caliber, then he’s not an elite coach, or this is no longer an elite program…or both.